Richard Powers - Plowing the Dark

Nothing, she said, nothing we make will ever match sunlight. A beautiful day beats all the art in the world.

He looked at her oddly. As if they were bound together. As if they had the luxury of the rest of their lives to come to terms with each other. I wouldn't know. I live in Seattle.

That reminds me, she said. Car. Ferry. Island. She stood and stretched. Garden. Dinner. Sleep. Wake. Work.

He stood with her. Where are you parked? I'll walk you.

They steered uphill, through the public sphere, avoiding by complex collision algorithm a throng of other autonomous agents loose on their own improvised routes. They pressed along Occidental, above the buried Underground warrens. A juggler to their left kept a small pastel solar system twirling in orbit. From the south floated the sound of a busker picking out "Will the Circle Be Unbroken?" Panhandlers of all races, colors, and creeds approached them with elaborate narratives— wives in vehicular distress, misunderstandings with employers involving salary moratoria, momentary misplacement of all worldly possessions— then retreated again, fifty cents richer, wishing them both the best of available afternoons.

They plotted a course through Occidental Park, midway between the totem pole and the knockoff pseudo-Greek plaster sculpture directly across the square from it. Adie threw repeated backward glances over her shoulder through the peopled fray.

It's bothering you, he caught her. Isn't it?

What is?

That statue. What's the matter? Can't name that tune?

Oh, I guess it's supposed to be an imitation of some kind ofkouros. One of the Apollos, maybe? Hard to tell. It's not a very good copy, to say the least

That's it? Don't look. What else?

She stopped and closed her eyes. Well, the size, for one thing. Too big. And it has all its limbs. I don't think any real ones are that intact.

That's all?

Can I peek again?

No.

The colors off. But I guess it's hard to make gypsum look like marble. And the face isn't right. More Roman than Archaic, I think.

And?

She shrugged.

Go ahead. Look.

Well, it bugs me that it's draped. I mean, really. Isnt the muzzling of the NEA bad enough? Next thing you know, the Met's going to be chipping off all the gonads with a chisel, like they did in the Middle Ages.

That's it?

She stamped in place. You tell me, Stevie. I give.

Come on. Let's go have a look.

They turned and doubled back. She stood in the prow of her step, watching the plaster statue swim into focus. Each step upped the resolution until she called out, My God.

Yep, Spiegel said. You got it.

She kept walking, as if additional evidence might overturn the obvious. They walked up to the threshold of the sculpture, its optimal viewing horizon. Close enough to see it blink, twitch, breathe.

Steve addressed the work. She thinks it's a disgrace that you're draped.

Adie dragged him away, trawling in her purse for some change to pitch into the inverted discus at the statue's feet.

She thinks that today's modern audience is mature enough to take their Classical antiquities without censorship…

She twisted his arm up behind his back, marching him. She cast another look over her shoulder, like Lot's wife. Like Orpheus. The statue refused to ripple so much as a crow's foot around its wet irises.

Across the square, she loosened her grip on his arm. So your eye is better than mine. Is that what you're trying to tell me?

He twisted free of her clamp. Their hands caught each other, holding on for a few awkward seconds.

Beginner's luck. Besides: I noticed him earlier, setting up.

Spiegel's futurist vision nagged at her for days afterward. He was mad, of course. But certain of his formulations made Adie wonder just what program she was, in fact, working on. For her, the electronic doll-house's sheer inconsequence had returned her to pleasure. And now pleasure — it shamed her to admit — intensified in the suggestion that it might be headed somewhere.

From the scorpion-tailed branch of one of her digital mango trees, she hung that fluid, flaming Munch painting of three northern women, hands behind their backs, midway between aesthetic transport and anxiety attack. And on the flip side of the bitmap, for anyone who walked around to the far side of the picture, she penciled a calligraphic quote from the painter: "Nature shows the images on the back side of the eye."

Jon Freese e-mailed her, asking for a jungle open house.

It's not ready yet, she cabled back.

He insisted. Just for the other in-house groups. So you can get some formal feedback.

The open house turned into a group show. Loque demoed a major new concept for writing paintbox filters. Got the idea from working with the artsy chick.

All hers, Adie objected. Don't look at me.

Instead of starting with bit-fiddling algorithms and trying to match them to artistic styles, we scan in a dozen examples of a given artist and make the edge-detection and signal-processing routines build up a catalog of stylistic tics.

Not tics, Adie said.

Pardonnez-moi. Mannerisms.

Love it, Spiegel said. Sort of the opposite of paint-by-numbers?

Ari Kaladjian stewed in place. You mean that you are giving up on the idea of formulating those functions that—?

We're not giving up on anything, Ari. We just thought we'd explore a new angle and see where it leads.

I ask you again: Does it do us any good to produce a cute little parroting routine, without learning how to formalize its behavior?

We're just letting the machine do the formalizing, Sue said.

Adie's turn came. Her colleagues kept together as a group down the twisting paths in the undergrowth, stumbling over each new visual quote as if by accident. They gasped at the nativities, oohed and aahed at the animated still lifes, and laughed at the illuminated monks embroidering their scrolls with vegetation that spilled off the vellum and grew into the jungle all around them.

On a path near the back edge of the forest, Kaladjian attacked. Will someone please tell me the point of this whole peculiar exercise?

Freese rose to Adie's defense. Come on, An. Its a demo. No more than everyone else's.

Yes. But what exactly does it demonstrate? It has no real three-dimensional modeling or ray tracing. The image field remains planar. There's no interaction to speak of. Aside from a few charming animal animations, the sprites are static. And the depicted data mean nothing at all. Hardly a state-of-the-art demonstration of what the environment might do.

The group fell silent, scuffing their collective feet on the forest floor. Spider Lim stood guard over his divan woman, as if the mathematician might attack her.

It struck Adie that the others were waiting for her to defend herself. Well, I don't know. I thought it was kind of nice to look at. Only Rajan laughed.

Spiegel rushed into the gap, covering for his recruit. Come on, Kaladjian. Who are you to tell potential clients how they should use a Cavern? It's just as interesting to build a room to visualize inspiration as it is to build one to visualize long hydrocarbon chains.

This "inspiration." Can you tell me where, in all these — snippets— we are supposed to find it? Can you give me one little proof by induction, one simple rule for telling it from non-inspiration?